Just a few weeks before Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman premiered on Broadway on February 10, 1949, President Harry Truman elaborated his “Fair Deal” for the American people in his State of the Union address. “We have rejected the discredited theory that the fortunes of the Nation should be in the hands of a privileged few,” he declared. “We have abandoned the ‘trickledown’ concept of national prosperity. Instead, we believe that our economic system should rest on a democratic foundation and that wealth should be created for the benefit of all.” Among other progressive measures, Truman advocated raising corporate taxes, increasing the minimum wage, providing universal health coverage, expanding civil rights protections, and repealing the year-and-a-half-old Taft-Hartley Act that limited the power of labor unions.

No doubt these proposals—and the need for them—were still ringing in the ears of Salesman’s first audiences at the elegant, 950-seat Morosco Theatre in the heart of Times Square (demolished in 1982 to make way for the looming Marriott Marquis Hotel). Miller recounted in his autobiography, Timebends, that no one clapped when the final curtain came down on the play’s first performances. Some men covered their faces while others wept openly, Miller wrote, and it “seemed forever before someone remembered to applaud.”

It’s easy to see why. Willy Loman’s self-deluded self-sacrifice near the end is heart-wrenching, as are the closing words of his wife, Linda, at his graveside: “I made the last payment on the house today. Today, dear. And there’ll be nobody home. We’re free and clear. We’re free. We’re free. We’re free.” But the state of the country at the beginning of 1949 must also have contributed to the audience’s stunned response. It’s only in retrospect that we can see the play as taking place on the cusp of postwar prosperity, though it is frequently described as unfolding amid that economic boom.

In its own moment, the national mood was grim. Over the preceding year, GDP had been falling and unemployment was on the rise. The same edition of TheNew York Times in which Brooks Atkinson proclaimed Salesman “superb” carried stories covering a “new plunge” on Wall Street, “nervous trading” in the widely fluctuating grain market, and a decline in consumer spending. Government and media outlets deliberately spoke about “disinflation” and “readjustment” rather than “depression” in order to allay public fears that the nation might backslide into the catastrophe that had abated only a decade earlier. Attacks on Truman’s proposals from the congressional right stressed individualism as America’s animating spirit, a callous ethos very much at the crux of Salesman.

None of these factors is explicitly cited in the play; like the never-named products that Willy sells, the war itself is barely mentioned, though both sons, Biff and Happy, would have been old enough to be drafted. Miller’s dramatic universe was more mythic than meticulously pinpointed. Still, economic precarity suffuses the Lomans’ home like a toxic fog. That haze hangs heavily in our own times—a feeling that is made material in the director Joe Mantello’s revelatory new production, where mist frequently rolls in from the wings.

Certain lines draw rueful laughs, or at least did both times I saw this production. For instance, when Happy complains, “I don’t know what the hell I’m workin’ for. Sometimes I sit in my apartment—all alone. And I think of the rent I’m paying. And it’s crazy.” Or when Willy rails, “Once in my life I would like to own something outright before it’s broken! I’m always in a race with the junkyard!… They time those things. They time them so when you finally paid for them, they’re used up.”

Those moments hint at a deeper sense of recognition. Audiences nowadays share a structure of feeling with those who first saw the play. Even people paying upwards of $800 for the best orchestra seats can’t be oblivious to the pervasive economic anxiety, unstable employment, and dubious social mobility of 2026. One might not think that Salesman could seem truly disturbing after its decades as a staple of high school syllabi; many theatergoers arrive already knowing that it will indict the crushing mendacity of the American Dream. Yet Mantello and his excellent cast, led by Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf, turn a CliffsNotes cliché into a fully felt, even shocking demonstration of how hope can curdle into reactionary ressentiment when confronted with the relentless brutality of that empty promise. More than in any of the four (out of five) previous Broadway revivals I have seen, the play lands now with fearsome power.

It has long been something of a canard that Miller was the standard-bearer for midcentury American drama’s kitchen-sink realism. His breakthrough, All My Sons, which opened in 1947, was in fact the last of his works to fully take this form. A domestic story with social overtones, it rehearses a driving conflict in Salesman: a son confronting his father over his moral failing. In this case, the father is a manufacturer who protected his profits by knowingly sending defective engine parts to the US Air Force during World War II, causing the death of American fighter pilots. (A recent London production starring Brian Cranston and Marianne Jean-Baptiste, shown in US cinemas through the National Theatre Live program, amply demonstrated how, in the hands of great actors, even Miller’s most nakedly contrived plotting can pack an emotional wallop.)

As the idea for the new play floated in his imagination, Miller went to see Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. That production, Miller wrote, opened a creative door for him, giving him “a license to speak at full throat,” and confirming his sense that Salesman “could not be encompassed by conventional realism.” His first notion for staging it, Miller revealed in an introduction to his collected plays, was “an enormous face the height of the proscenium arch which would appear and then open up, and we would see the inside of a man’s head.” (The Inside of His Head was Miller’s draft title.) In Salesman, the sequential causality of standard realism gives way to Willy’s sense that past and present exist simultaneously and indistinguishably—a rejection of the “linear or eventual” method of All My Sons, as Miller wrote, in which each event inexorably leads to the next. The scenic designer Jo Mielziner translated Miller’s concept visually for the premiere production by filling the stage with a two-story house, entirely open in front as if the façade had been sliced away, and the side walls scrim-covered frames that could appear transparent. Characters in the present-tense action came in through doors, but figures from the past crossed the downstage perimeter as they entered Willy’s mind. This design realized Miller’s idea so precisely that Miller wrote it into the stage directions of the published text. 

Salesman debuted to ecstatic daily reviews, but over the years that followed critics who wrote for “serious” magazines like Partisan Review and Commentary derided Miller’s melodramatic mechanics. Of a climactic confrontation between Biff and Willy in a Boston hotel room (one of the scenes from the past that floods Willy’s mind), Eleanor Clark chided, “Nothing excuses the triteness and the pseudo-psychoanalytic nature of the Boston scene, dragged in to explain Biff’s failures.” Others lambasted Miller’s dime-store Marxism and, worst of all, his “middlebrow” pretensions—a particularly grave sin in the era when Eric Bentley’s Playwright as Thinker (1946) championed the heady European modernists to American readers, and when a countercultural theatrical movement was beginning to emerge in the US. (The Living Theatre, the experimental pacificist-anarchist troupe, was founded in 1947.) Salesman could hardly have seemed more out of step with these challenges to the commercial theater: Willy Loman came across as “a capitalized Human Being, without being anyone…demanding a statistical attention and generalized, impersonal condolence, like that of the editorial page,” wrote Mary McCarthy.

But as high/low distinctions eroded faster than the Warhol Factory could turn out silkscreens, some of the critics who had judged Miller harshly—Bentley and Robert Brustein, for instance—softened their judgments. After Miller’s death in 2005, Brustein wrote that he had come around to appreciating the “overwhelming power” Miller’s plays had in performance. Bentley was more tepid, but still: “Well, he’s better than I said, probably,” he told an interviewer in 2016. They had to admit that, in his best work, Miller—a carpenter by avocation—builds individual scenes and dramatic arcs with architectural precision. From the opening moments of Salesman, when Willy enters weighed down by his two large sample cases, he begins his downward spiral, and the audience is caught in its gravitational pull.

Like all enduring plays, Salesman has persistently caught its moment in its subsequent major productions—each one rapturously reviewed (and four of them, including Mantello’s, winning Best Revival Tony Awards). The first Broadway revival opened in 1975, when New York was on the brink of fiscal collapse, and by all accounts George C. Scott’s Willy—“like both bull and bullfighter in an arena,” wrote Clive Barnes in The New York Times—railed mightily and collapsed heavily under the weight of forces beyond his control. Nearly a decade later, in the greed-is-good Reagan years, Dustin Hoffman offered a feisty and antic Willy, a man scuttling along the tracks of the zeitgeist, unable to climb aboard the train. When Brian Dennehy took on the role in 1999, the Dow was about to cross 10,000 for the first time and the federal government was running a budget surplus. Amid a mood of economic confidence, Dennehy zeroed in on Willy’s inner drama, drawing deep empathy for a man experiencing excruciating psychological pain.

In 2012 the director Mike Nichols, who had said that seeing the original 1949 production as a teenager ignited his interest in theater, reverently reproduced its look and sound, using Mielziner’s set and Alex North’s flute-forward incidental music; his Willy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, presented a harrowing study of bewildered isolation: slumped, self-loathing, laboring to believe in the go-get-’em platitudes he spouts. Then, four years ago, as the surge of white support for the Black Lives Matter movement was subsiding, Wendell Pierce led a cast of black actors as the Lomans. Other characters were played by white actors, adding a stinging layer of racism to the obstacles Willy faces; Pierce was shattering in his forced buoyancy. More than previous revivals, that production (which originated at London’s Young Vic) leaned into the play’s expressionistic dimension: the set designer Anna Fleischle suggested the house by busily flying in window frames, doorways, and even some furniture from above when needed; the director, Miranda Cromwell, interpolated songs that heightened the play’s emotional effect. Sharon D. Clarke, a stunning, stoic Linda, ended the closing scene at Willy’s grave with a haunting gospel tune. 

In the current production, Mantello pulls the play even more forcefully—and more fruitfully—toward abstraction. In place of the standard house, he and the set designer Chloe Lamford have constructed a vast, warehouse-like nowhere. Setting—kitchen, bedroom, restaurant, office, hotel room, yard, cemetery—is fluidly evoked by a table or chair here, a couple of steel benches there, a partially dirt-strewn floor, a lonely upstage refrigerator. Pillars that have shed much of their tiling are arrayed across the wide space, lending some vertical lift as well as suggesting aspiration and its disintegration. Along the edges, barely discernible objects—a tricycle, a watering can—sometimes catch a shaft of light, memorabilia of the family’s past that drift in and out of Willy’s mind.

An oversized garage door fills the upstage-center wall, and the play opens with headlights beaming right into our eyes as—for the first time in any Broadway production—Willy drives his car onstage. It stays parked there for almost the entire two and three-quarter hours of the show, source and symbol of both Willy’s livelihood and his demise. Characters sometimes enter from or exit into it; Linda rests a coffee pot on its hood; teenage Biff strides atop its roof vowing to run for a touchdown in his upcoming game. In the penultimate scene, the garage door slides open and Willy backs out—of the space, of life.

The car is one of many anachronistic elements that make time as fluid as space in this production. Though the text tells us that Willy has replaced his old Chevy with a Studebaker, what we see is a sleek Chevrolet—the automobile whose famous slogan summons us, like the play itself, to “see the USA.” While that tagline emerged in the late 1940s, contemporaneous with Salesman, the model on stage is a 1964 Chevelle, a famed “muscle car” known for those made-in-America ideals of high performance and quick acceleration.

Other details also suggest the sweep of the last eighty years, further widening the play’s metaphoric scope. A half-gallon carton of Organic Valley milk sits on the table. In Rudy Mance’s costuming, Willy wears a timeless department-store brown suit and Linda, at the beginning of Act Two, contemporary black slacks and a teal blouse, a color trendy at midcentury, in the 1990s, and again now. In the excruciating scene in which Willy grovels before his young boss, Howard (John Drea), begging not to be fired, Drea wears a tech-bro vest over his shirt and tie and sips from a paper coffee cup he might have picked up around the corner during intermission. The point isn’t to hammer what we already know about today’s rapacious robber barons but to subsume us in the long arc of profit-driven cruelty.

This permeability of time reflects Willy’s mental state. He lives at once in an idealized past and an untenable present. Subtle shifts in Jack Knowles’s atmospheric lighting—between amber warmth and steely starkness—demarcate these realms. But Willy makes no distinction as he crosses his personal time zones. Breaking from the tradition that began with Elia Kazan’s storied premiere production, in which actors playing Biff, Happy, and their neighboring classmate Bernard portrayed the characters both as adult men and as teenagers, Mantello cast additional actors to play the boys in their youth. We see them, then, as Willy remembers them. (Miller’s pre-production draft, which Mantello consulted, calls for separate actors for the younger and older sons.) Often the two Biffs and Haps occupy the stage at the same time, conveying a woeful sense of the grown men’s squandered potential and the unshakeable specter of the past in the present. We carry this perception into the devastating final face-off between father and son—in which Biff breaks down as he tries in vain to persuade Willy to “take that phony dream and burn it.”

A significant strain of criticism of Miller, in the decades since Salesman’s premiere, has involved his female characters. A generation of feminist scholars pulled apart his tendency to present women as either helpmates or temptresses, never protagonists. In a much-cited essay from 1989, Kay Stanton argued that “the American Dream as presented in Death of a Salesman is male-oriented, but it requires unacknowledged dependence upon women as well as women’s subjugation and exploitation.” In a mid-1990s cover-story takedown of Miller in London’s The Sunday Times, Rhoda Koenig famously called Linda “a dumb and useful doormat.”

That sharp criticism has dulled with the years, however, especially as actors have brought layers of strength and complexity to Miller’s roles. The last decade has also seen a spate of dramaturgical rejoinders, additive rather than censorious works that take off from Salesman to offer Linda’s character a different path: Eleanor Burgess’s prequel to Miller’s drama, Wife of a Salesman; Barbara Cassidy’s sequel, Mrs. Loman; and Katie Forgette’s backstage comedy, Mrs. Loman is Leaving. (Another half-dozen such works pick up on The Crucible, most prominently Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor is the Villain, a nominee for the best-play Tony last year.)

Thanks to Laurie Metcalf’s performance, Mantello’s production tacitly joins this trend. Her Linda is tenacious, tender, complex: the family mainstay, packed with tamped-down frustrations and practiced good cheer. We recognize that it takes labor not only to keep the household accounts, but also to shore up her flailing husband. She accepts her job—and excels at it—without bitterness or self-pity.

Meanwhile, at a time when the nation speaks officially in the register of bluster, braggadocio, and hostile barbs, the Loman men seem all too familiar. Willy lies, browbeats, contradicts himself, badgers others into repeating his fantasy version of the truth. Lane strikes a properly wobbly balance between depicting a despairing man who has lost his grip on reality and a megalomaniacal one trying to force others to accept his sham version of it; he’s both sympathetic and repellent. The play brims with violent rhetoric: Willy boasts, falsely, that on his sales trips he “knocked ’em cold in Providence, slaughtered them in Boston.” The value system he imparts to his sons, too, measures human worth in dollars and defines success—and masculinity—as the vanquishing of others: “You guys together could absolutely lick the civilized world,” he tells them. Happy, pumping himself up in his father’s mode (with jaunty insouciance in Ben Ahlers’s portrayal), describes his pursuit of women as “like bowling or something. I just keep knockin’ them over and it doesn’t mean anything.”  

In contrast, Biff, long disillusioned by his father’s infidelity, struggles to purge the poison Willy has pumped into him. Christopher Abbott plays the adrift thirty-four-year-old as coiled up with frustration, struggling to contain an impulse to strike out. It’s both shocking and strangely satisfying when he almost does so: as Willy eggs Biff on, advising him on how to seek a business loan, he barks at Linda to “stop interrupting.” Biff springs up, crying, “Stop yelling at her!” and cocks his fist. Where Willy’s efforts to bat Linda away were likely once read simply as underscoring his delusional bullishness, today they come out slathered with sexism.

The production’s most surprising innovation is to not only foreground Willy’s misogyny but spotlight its part in what bell hooks long ago called “white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” In an unconventional casting choice, black actors play Willy’s generous neighbor, Charley (K. Todd Freeman), and Charley’s hardworking son, Bernard (Michael Benjamin Washington as an adult; Karl Green as a teenager). Willy’s envy of them, then, reeks of white grievance. When Willy turns down a job offer from Charley, his refusal—“I just can’t work for you”—reads as repugnant racial pride.

Linda, in Metcalf’s masterly portrayal, is the only one who understands not just that Willy has misplaced his faith in a noxious system—as Biff also grasps—but also what produces its toxicity. She describes him to Biff as “only a little boat looking for a harbor”—an inchoate recognition of the storm that bandies him about. In the closing funeral scene, which Miller titled “Requiem,” she grieves Willy’s death, to be sure. But Metcalf offers a glimmer of possibility in those last words, along with an innovative gesture: she buries a paper—presumably the paid-off mortgage deed—with her husband. I couldn’t help feeling that for all her sadness, Linda realizes that she, herself, is now free.